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After reading your recent post, I thought you might find this interesting - especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It's an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading - with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later - he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike.

"Bitcoin-Central got the go-ahead thanks to a deal with French financial firms Aqoba and Credit Mutuel. The exchange is one of many that swaps bitcoins, computer generated cash, for real world currencies. The change in status makes it easier to use bitcoins and bestows national protections on balances held at the exchange."

"On Saturday, around 18 months after President Obama signed it into law, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act will take effect. Ostensibly, the act is designed to bring U.S. patent law in line with the rest of the world. Of course, not everybody feels it will help achieve the patent system's goal of protecting inventors while fostering innovation, and its effect could be even more pronounced on the DIY inventor."

Android applications downloaded by as many as 185 million users can expose end users' online banking and social networking credentials, e-mail and instant-messaging contents because the programs use inadequate encryption protections, computer scientists have found. The researchers identified 41 applications in Google's Play Market that leaked sensitive data as it traveled between handsets running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android and webservers for banks and other online services. By connecting the devices to a local area network that used a variety of well-known exploits, some of them available online, the scientists were able to defeat the secure sockets layer and transport layer security protocols implemented by the apps. Their research paper didn't identify the programs, except to say they have been downloaded from 39.5 million and 185 million times, based on Google statistics.

Google, MSN Search, Yahoo!, AOL, and most other search engines collect and store records of your search queries. If these records are revealed to others, they can be embarrassing or even cause great harm. Would you want strangers to see searches that reference your online reading habits, medical history, finances, sexual orientation, or political affiliation?

The objective of this project is the design and development of a privacy-aware content filtering platform focused on future pervasive wireless networks.  I'm expected to design a content filtering and users protection platform based on two building blocks: